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Your Own Personal Web Server

If you spend time working with WordPress – that is, not blogging, but testing plugins, tweaking themes, modifying stylesheets, and generally just messing with the code – you’ve probably wished you could test your changes before hitting “Publish” on your blog.

Well, you can.

Installing the services needed to run WordPress on a Windows computer is hardly any more complicated than installing WordPress on a web host.

And it is free.

You’ll need three services: Apache, MySQL, and PHP. All three can be found bundled for easy download and installation in the WAMP Server (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

The WAMP installation takes just a few minutes (it can take a bit of time to configure security on MySQL, if you choose to do so), and the subsequent WordPress install is almost as simple as a one click Simple Script install.

There are many tutorials on the web. I found this one, from SimpleHelp.net, useful.

Even if all you do is give various themes a dry run before recommending or installing them, you’ll save yourself many headaches. So be adventurous! You’ll find plenty of uses for your own web server.

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Tags: WAMP, wordpress